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Daniela Cesiri, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Salento, Lecce, Italy

SUMMARY As stated in the title of the volume itself, the 'leitmotif' that joins together the papers contained in the volume is ''Dialects across borders'', a theme that had already been used as a special topic of the Conference, and that was chosen by the organizers (and editors of the volume) because it better reflects the linguistic situation of the area hosting the Conference itself, that is ''a historical border area between two states and two different linguistic and cultural traditions'' (pg. vi). The thirteen selected papers included in the volume were grouped into three different parts, each of which reflected the 'type of border' it dealt with.

Part I contains five articles revolving around the theme of ''Dialects across political and historical borders''.

Peter Auer's contribution on ''The construction of linguistic borders and the linguistic construction of borders'' analyzes the German linguistic situation, in particular the existing links between the nation-state and the actual geographical space which appears to be a physical as well as a mental structure. By comparing the dialectal perceptions of informants from areas formerly belonging to the Eastern and Western parts of Germany, the author points out that, although at present they are all part of the German 'nation-state', the southwest German informants consider the Swabian and Low Alemannic dialects as different from their own because of the former German political separation, although, dialectologically speaking, they are actually very similar. Auer concludes his analysis by arguing that cognitive constructions often contribute to delimit dialect communities, hence influencing the dialect continuum of that territory.

''Static spatial relations in German and Romance: towards a cognitive dialectology of posture verbs and locative adverbials'' by Raphael Berthele combines dialectology and language contact methods of study, providing also a cognitive theoretical framework, in order to examine concepts of motion in space and static relation in Standard High German and a group of Swiss German dialects, with a comparison source provided by data from Romance languages present in the neighboring areas, such as French, Italian, and Romansh. Evidence from the comparison of the data shows that, in expressing spatial relations, Swiss German dialects and Romansh prefer verb phrase constructions formed by a verb followed by a locative prepositional phrase plus an adverb that result in being semantically redundant. Conversely, Standard High German, Standard Italian and Standard French present rare (if any) occurrences of such constructions, since they rather favor a simple prepositional phrase. The Swiss German and Romansh data are ascribed by the author to adstratal influences emerged from the complex Swiss linguistic situation.

''Ingressive particles across borders: Gender and discourse parallels across the North Atlantic'' by Sandra Clarke and Gunnel Melchers deals with the until now rarely studied pulmonic ingressive articulation, arguing that ingressive discourse particles, found in a zone extending from the eastern Baltic to the Atlantic coast of the United States, are an areal feature that is to be ascribed to a language contact situation. Evidence extracted from the study suggests to the two authors the conclusion that this phenomenon took place in a cross-dialectal situation where transmission involved social and pragmatic factors.

''On the development of the consonant system in Mennonite Low German (Plautdietsch)'' by Larissa Naiditch is part of a wider synchronic and diachronic study that focuses on an insular German dialect, today spoken in Siberia, Kazakhstan, the USA and Mexico by the independent religious community of the Mennonites. The author bases her research on data extracted from tape recordings and notes taken in Kazakhstan and in Germany among informants immigrated from the former Soviet Union, as well as from literature in Plautdietsch, investigating the development of the consonant system of this variety, that bore traces of a number of dialects from the areas where the Mennonite community resided during its migration history.

''English dialects in the British Isles in a cross-variety perspective: A base-line for future research'' by Sali Tagliamonte, Jennifer Smith and Helen Lawrence aims at establishing historical links between the new and old world varieties of English through the comparison of syntactic features from six varieties of English spoken in the North of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The research shows that the verbal -s feature is one of the best candidates as a diagnostic feature of such a relationship, whereas NEG/AUX contraction, ''for to'' infinitives, and zero adverbs present more problems in the linguistic analysis of similarities and differences in the varieties considered. In their conclusion, the authors suggest that significant results could be achieved only in the examination of variable constraints occurring in linguistic features common to Old and New World varieties.

The five articles included in Part II share the topic of ''Dialects across social and regional borders'':

''Dialects across internal frontiers: Some cognitive boundaries'' by Dennis E. Preston investigates the ongoing vowel changes in the urban dialects of the Northern Cities Chain Shift in the U.S.A. The approach followed involves theoretical frameworks from various disciplines, namely dialectology, sociolinguistics and the so-called 'folk linguistics' (that is, laypeople knowledge of linguistics), that the author summarizes in the single term 'sociophonetics'. In particular, Preston investigates the correlation of age, commitment to the residence in a certain locality, and the influence of ethnic background and social connections on the speaker's accommodation process in the latter adoption of vowel change. A further development is given by reflections on the ability of a speaker to imitate a dialect different to his own, and the perception that this imitation produces to the speakers of that dialect, as well as gender factors involving the speaker's perception.

''On 'dative sickness' and other kinds of linguistic diseases in Modern Icelandic'' by Finnur Fridriksson enquires into changes in the use of case-inflections in the grammar of modern Icelandic. Analyzing in particular the use of the dative, accusative and genitive in subject position in some regional and social Icelandic dialects, the authors seeks to reveal how their supposed threat to the stability of Icelandic case system is actually not motivated and supported by field data, due to the infrequency of such occurrences in the dialect material examined. The author proposes that such unmotivated alarmism is rather to be attributed to the educational system's efforts in eliminating non-standard usages in the pupils linguistic habits.

In ''Can we find more variety in variation?'', the author, Ronald Macaulay investigates the influence of external factors to linguistic variation with its implication in sociolinguistic studies. Glasgow English provides the data for the author's research, whose starting point has been the careful selection of the right methodology in data collection. Macaulay, in fact, believes that the communicative situation must be a 'peer-event', where all the participants are at the same level and no figure of interviewer is perceived. The author, then, proposes to study external factors such as age, gender, and social class in connection with each other and not as separate aspects, together with new ones (related mainly to discourse feature) that have not been considered in previous sociolinguistic studies

''Pronunciation of /Ei/ in avant-garde Dutch: A cross-sex acoustic study'' by Vincent J. van Heuven, Renée van Bezooijen and Loulou Edelman deals with an acoustic study of 32 speakers of Dutch participating in a television talk show, focusing in particular on diphthong /Ei/ produced by those guests who speak an emerging variety of Dutch, known as Polder Dutch. Acoustic measurements allowed the authors to observe in detail this phenomenon, which, according to the authors, represents another sociolinguistic case of linguistic change spread by female speakers.

The last paper in Part II, ''A tale of two dialects: Relativization in Newcastle and Sheffield'' by Joan C. Beal and Karen P. Corrigan examines regional variation in two northern urban dialects of English, which is part of a wider ongoing project on dialects in Northern England. Presenting data extracted from the analysis of relativization strategies in speakers of the urban dialects of Tyneside and Sheffield, this article demonstrates that more detailed distinctions in these two varieties (already detected in phonological studies) are eventually confirmed at a morphosyntactic level.

Part III contains the last three articles of the volume and focuses on the major topic of ''Dialects across language boundaries'':

''Crossing grammatical borders: Tracing the path of contact-induced linguistic change'' by Ruth King introduces the question of linguistic constraints on grammatical borrowing phenomena in a bilingual situation. The author examines in particular the linguistic situation of Prince Edward Island French (Canada) where two different villages show distinctive usages of either French or English: one has French origins and uses at home either the sole French language or both French and English, whereas in the other village, the community is losing institutional support for French, that is gradually but increasingly being substituted by English even in conversation at home. However, the analysis of Preposition Stranding data leads the author to the conclusion that there is no direct syntactic borrowing from English, but only the dominance of lexical borrowing as the cause of syntactic change in Prince Edward Island's language.

''The _after_-perfect in Irish English'' by Patricia Ronan is a study dealing with the typical Irish _after_-perfect construction that is used to mark 'hot news' events. The phenomenon is renowned and has already been the core of numerous contributions. To the better understanding of this perfective form, however, the author introduces new possible implications emerging in Dublin speakers. Ronan examines her data taken from observation of speakers from different varieties of Irish English and from interviews to elderly people living in Dublin (belonging mainly to the working-class) collected by the American sociologist K. Kearns. Evidence from these sources draws the author to the conclusion that Irish English after-perfect at present includes denotations of both 'hot news' events and a more general perfective meaning.

Last in the section and in the volume, ''Dialect history in black and white: Are two colours enough?'' by J. L. Dillard is a critical comment on recent theories on the origins of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). The author argues that plurilingualism in the historical factors contributing to the formation of such a variety rather than the traditional substratum theory is to be considered a primary factor in the creation of this variety. To support his statement, Dillard brings evidence from the fact that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century West-African slaves had more contacts with indigenous Americans than with Europeans, hence the major influence was not provided by the English language, but by multi-language contacts with different Indo-European languages, as for instance in the case of the West Indian Islands.

EVALUATION The task of uniting articles dealing with such different issues as those involved in the major theme of 'dialects across borders' is certainly not an easy one. The editors, however, have managed to keep an internal coherence in the volume itself, at the same time giving enough space to phenomena concerning many languages (from the most to the least renowned), as well as presenting an almost complete view of all the factors involving processes of language contact and all the socio-linguistic implications deriving from this situation. Each of the articles contained in the volume meets international scholarly standards and provides not only results on the research undergone by the different authors, but simultaneously offers tentative suggestions for further research. Although this book is not suitable for students, or scholars, approaching for the first time the discipline of dialect studies, it is all the same highly recommended for those who are interested in new perspectives and theoretical approaches to language contact studies.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER Daniela Cesiri works at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Salento (formerly named University of Lecce), Italy. She is currently completing her Ph. D. dissertation, where she analyzes discourse and syntactic features of the nineteenth-century texts contained in a ''Corpus of Irish Fairy and Folk Tales'' of her own compilation. Her main research interests include English historical linguistics, lexicology, lexicography and historical dialectology with a particular focus on Irish English and its linguistic, as well as socio-cultural, interrelations with other varieties of the English Language in the British Isles.